Wednesday, March 08, 2017

From a posting by Barry Shaw*, 7 March 2017:...Strategic thinking dare not go beyond [the "two-state road block"]. No alternative route to peace can be contemplated. It is, for too many, the only route allowed. ...The only end goal is a Palestinian state and they try to convince us that this is the only ultimate aim that should be considered.Hamas public execution of political dissidents and "collaborators" with Israel

...Allow me to predict the reality of a Palestine that will emerge from their efforts. And my prediction is firmly based on facts on the ground that any thinking diplomat should be able to see for themselves.

Firstly, when they talk about the negotiating arm of Palestine they only refer to the Authority led by the undemocratic, corrupt and elderly leadership of Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas claims he represents the Palestinian people.

In their parliamentary elections of 1996, parties not affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation were banned from registering their candidates and Hamas refused to participate. When the inevitable results were announced Hamas usurped power in the Gaza Strip in a bloody civil war which left Arabs dead on both sides of the political divide.

What is swept under the carpet is the fact that in the 2006 parliamentary elections Hamas won an overwhelming victory taking 74 of the 132 seats. The Palestinian Authority have been fearful of holding parliamentary elections ever since.

Hamas continues to enhance its grip on power in the Gaza Strip by eliminating much of the opposition by fair means or foul. Its repressive fist leave Gazans hostage to the whims of an ideological-based terror regime that devotes its full attention and most of its finances to developing an increasingly sophisticated terrorist infrastructure. Despite an internationally legitimate blockage on Gaza both by Israel and by Egypt, Hamas has stockpiled thousands of missiles aimed at Israel.

The anti-Semitic Hamas founding charter openly calls for the murder of Jews. And they have made steady headway in the territories controlled by its Fatah-led rival, the Palestinian Authority

If not for the tireless efforts of Israel’s counter-terror intelligence and security forces Hamas would be the power of influence in key West Bank cities governed by the Palestinian Authority including Bethlehem, Hebron, Tulkarm and even in east Jerusalem.

In April 2015, Hamas students scored a convincing victory in the student council election winning 26 seats as opposed to Fatah’s 19. For those unfamiliar with the geography Bir Zeit is located just ten kilometres north of Ramallah, the central headquarters of Fatah and the seat of the Palestinian Authority administration. Bir Zeit has been considered as the most liberal of all Palestinian universities and is, therefore, a good indicator of the mood of the Palestinian street in the West Bank.

How about the future political face of Palestine? In Gaza, Hamas just elected their replacement to Ismael Haniyeh. If you thought that the old face of Hamas was bad, the new face is even worse. Haniyeh was a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood. His replacement, Yahya Sinwar, is an arch-terrorist linked to the extremist Islamic Salafist movement.

Sinwar was released from a twenty-year prison sentence on gross terrorism charges as part of a prisoner exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped from Israel and dragged into Gaza by a Hamas terror cell and kept in captivity for five years. Sinwar is not only responsible for the deaths of many Israelis. He is also reported to have murdered Palestinians with his own hands on alleged charges of “spying” or “collaboration” though it is more likely that they opposed his ruthless Hamas oppression.

The Hamas monster is such a distasteful reality that [proponents of the two-state paradigm] need to airbrush it out of their incessant campaign. Better, they think, to ignore it. Raising the likely outcome of Hamas usurping power by the ballot or by the bullet in the West Bank in a new Palestine is too awful a thought. Better to leave it to the Israelis to deal with after the Jewish state has been forced to withdraw to impossibly vulnerable lines.

As for the Palestinian Authority, a Post-Abbas future looks equally grim.

I am involved in a campaign to have Jibril Rajoub removed from his position as the Palestinian delegate at FIFA, the governing body of soccer. We have irrefutable evidence of Rajoub using football, and other sports, to propagate and glorify Palestinian terrorism including naming sports events after Palestinian terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians, including women and children.
Yet, shockingly, this man is one of the leading candidates to replace Mahmoud Abbas.

The other leading candidate is Marwan Barghouti currently serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli jail for his murderous terror outrages against Israeli civilians. In a 2015 Palestinian poll he was the only Fatah candidate pegged to defeat Hamas in any Palestinian election.

One would have thought the record of these candidates would disqualify them from serving as president of any country but, in a society brainwashed and indoctrinated in hatred and violence and the inadmissibility of a Jewish state, this is the result.

The inevitability of yet another civil war seems certain. These rival forces are divided by a deep political chasm. They may be united in their hatred of the Jewish state which in both their lexicons must be obliterated, by stages if necessary, but when push comes to shove they hate and distrust each other as they vie for overall power.This is the Palestine a naïve and cynical world is determined to impose on Israel.

The two-state solution demands an Israeli withdrawal from territories and a vague Palestinian promise to desist from violence.

The inadvisability of establishing such a regime is not predicated on issues of settlements or borders. It is entirely based on the inevitable spectre of a violent politically nonviable Palestine with a long term agenda to continue its struggle to destroy whatever remains of Israel.

Therefore it is essential for the Israeli government and all self-respecting academic and strategic think tanks to ask the diplomatic community and the impactful global institutions what they are doing to reform the Palestinian leadership into united and peace-loving pragmatists.So far we have seen little progress in any such reformation. Nor are we likely to see any positive change going forward.If no assurance can be given then Israel cannot be expected to make dangerous concessions based on nothing more than the empty echo of peace.

*Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of the new book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’

I would not get involved in any New Israel Fund activities. The organisation spends about 30% of its funds on NGOs that undermine Israel's existence and vilify it around the world.

For example, Breaking the Silence alleges that the IDF has committed war crimes and is guilty of “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing.”

BtS has provided 57 negative testimonies in international reports against IDF soldiers. A Palestinian foundation — The Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, operating in Ramallah, noted in a report published in 2015 that it paid BtS in order to bring at least one negative testimony against the IDF.

Hamas admitted this past year that it used the BtS report on Operation Protective Edge for the purposes of its propaganda campaign against Israel.

So Breaking the Silence (BtS):

implies all of Israel is occupied territory and defames the IDF,

has been banned from any events attended by Israeli soldiers, and

is banned from Israel’s school system.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett has said,

“Our children are sent to the education system in order to encourage mutual responsibility, and not to harm IDF soldiers. The operations of Breaking the Silence caused the slander of Israel in the world, as they made it their target to harm their brothers, who protect us. Lies and propaganda against the IDF — not in our schools.”

However when Ben-Gurion University recently said that Breaking the Silence “is an organization that is not in the national consensus, the New Israel Fund chose to come to the rescue — and launched a campaign, raising $20,000 for the organization.Breaking the Silence is rejected across the Israeli political spectrum — and despite this, The New Israel Fund has authorized grants worth $699,310 to it in the last six years. SHAME ON THE NIF!!!

In the next inevitable confrontation with the terror group, the lessons of the Hamas War must not be ignored

Israel's State Comptroller’s Report on Operation Protective Edge, the Jewish state’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, is exceedingly detailed. The problem is that it addresses the wrong details.

Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to do with the regional and global context of the war. The second had to do with its understanding of its enemy on the ground.

War between Hamas and Israel took place as the Sunni Arab world was steeped a two-pronged existential struggle. On the one hand, Sunni regimes fought jihadist groups that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement. On the other, they fought against Iran and its proxies in a bid to block Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony.

On both fronts, the Sunni regimes, led by Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates, were shocked to discover that the Obama administration was siding with their enemies against them.

If Israel went into the war against Hamas thinking that the Obama administration would treat it differently than it treated the Sunni regimes, it quickly discovered that it was mistaken. From the outset of the battle between Hamas and Israel, the Obama administration supported Hamas against Israel.America’s support for Hamas was expressed at the earliest stages of the war when then-secretary of state John Kerry demanded that Israel accept an immediate cease-fire based entirely on Hamas’s terms. This demand, in various forms, remained the administration’s position throughout the 50-day war.

Hamas’s terms were impossible for Israel. They included opening the jihadist regime’s land borders with Israel and Egypt, and providing it with open access to the sea. Hamas demanded to be reconnected to the international banking system in order to enable funds to enter Gaza freely from any spot on the globe. Hamas also demanded that Israel release its terrorists from its prisons.

If Israel had accepted any of Hamas’s cease-fire terms, its agreement would have constituted a strategic defeat for Israel and a historic victory for Hamas.

Open borders for Hamas means the free flow of armaments, recruits, trainers and money to Gaza. Were Hamas to be connected to the international banking system, the jihadist regime would have become the banking center of the global jihad.

The Obama administration’s support for Hamas was not passive.Obama and Kerry threatened to join the Europeans in condemning Israel at the UN. Administration officials continuously railed against IDF operations in Gaza, insinuating that Israel was committing war crimes by insisting that Israel wasn’t doing enough to avoid civilian casualties.As the war progressed, the administration’s actions against Israel became more aggressive. Washington placed a partial embargo on weapons shipments to Israel.Then on July 23, 2014, the administration took the almost inconceivable step of having the Federal Aviation Administration ban flights of US carriers to Ben-Gurion Airport for 36 hours. The flight ban was instituted after a Hamas missile fell a mile from the airport.The FAA did not ban flights to Pakistan or Afghanistan after jihadists on the ground successfully bombed airplanes out of the sky.

It took Sen. Ted Cruz’s threat to place a hold on all State Department appointments, and Canada’s Conservative Party government’s behind-the-scenes diplomatic revolt to get the flight ban rescinded.

The government and the IDF were shocked by the ferocity of the administration’s hostility. But to his great credit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surmounted it.Netanyahu realized that Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood nexus of jihad and also supported by Iran. As a result the Egyptians, Saudis and UAE rightly view it as a major enemy. Indeed, Egypt was in a state of war with Hamas in 2014. Gaza serves as the logistical base of the Salafist forces warring against the Egyptian military.Netanyahu asked Sisi for help in blunting the American campaign for Hamas. Sisi was quick to agree and brought the Saudis and the UAE into an all-but-declared operational alliance with Israel against Hamas.

Since the Egyptians were hosting the cease-fire talks, Egypt was well-positioned to blunt Obama’s demand that Israel accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.

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